The advent of digital photography and Internet-based photo sharing sites has made photography more popular and accessible to the masses. However, photo sharing sites do not facilitate displaying of images when users are off-line and away from a computer. While inkjet printers have become more very adept at printing images, users who are inclined to print images on photo paper still need a traditional photo album in order to keep images together and facilitate their display.
Printing photographs onto sheets of paper allows a person to view photographs when the person is off-line and away from a computer. However, carrying around sheets of printed photographs is cumbersome and difficult. Some computer software comes with pre-made templates that make selecting images to print in various sizes fast and easy. For example the Windows™ XP operating system has a photo printing wizard that prints sheets of so-called “wallet sized photos.” Each such sheet contains up to nine images arranged in a three-by-three grid. Each image is 2½″×3¼″
These “wallet-sized photos” can be displayed in the sheet format or the images can be separated by cutting them apart. However, there are various problems inherent with doing so. For example, cutting the images into identical wallet-sized prints can be tedious and requires the user to put each individual photo into a separate pocket of the wallet. Alternatively, if a user instead folds an 8½″×11″ sheet of images over and over again until it is wallet-sized, the paper would bulge and “scrunch” where the thickest folds are located, which would reduce the quality of the images. Such a sheet would also be time-consuming to retrieve and fold and unfold every time a person wishes to display the photographs.
Thus, there is still a need in the art for systems and methods of easily creating portable photographs that are easily transported and displayed.